Yesterday, the Guardian published a leaked World Bank memo, which criticized the Bank's President, James Wolfensohn, for being "isolated from reality" and fostering "an atmosphere of fear" in the Bank. Wolfensohn has been busy for the last few years trying to re-create the Bank as a disinterested participant in global debates around development. Yet, the memo says, he has failed to "practice the values and behaviours he espouses for the rest of us".

The climate change talks at The Hague were disrupted yesterday by protesters who burst into a negotiating room and staged a sit-in, and by a separate incident in which a woman pressed a chocolate cream cake in the face of the head of the US delegation, Undersecretary of State Frank E Loy, as he gave his daily press briefing.

The petrol crisis is an eerie harbinger of what's to come when the pumps run dry for good. For that, and for the environment, we must begun turning to the sun, says environment editor
Joanna Griffiths.

The acquittal of 28 Greenpeace protesters who destroyed an experimental maize crop has given the environmental movement a timely boost in the wake of the success of the oil blockades, writes environment editor Joanna Griffiths.